JWG

Global Cooling?

We read about Global Warming all the time - there was another such article in the Boston Globe today about the noticeable effect on species. We don't read much about the coming of the next Ice Age.

William Calvin wrote a fascinating book called A Brain for all Seasons. He describes among other things how the current warming trend could accelerate the arrival of the next Ice Age because of the effect on the loop of the currents in the North Atlantic. Calvin is a neurophysiologist and has created a fascinating read with interesting stuff about paleontology, evolution, and climatology. Among other things, the web site has the entire text of the book and also some relevant articles. One such article appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1998; it is also on the web site; reading it is a good introduction to his thesis.

The end of the AM article has one of my favorite Auden lines.

"Those who will not reason
Perish in the act:
Those who will not act
Perish for that reason."
— W. H. Auden, 1907-1973

masterful prepositions

I could be completely off base but I thought that this global water current pattern continued to function during various ice ages in the past, and either moderated them or helped in tipping them to reverse. Have we broken things that bad?

And all this without taking in any new information!

It was >5years ago I spoke with some people in Tennessee who were claiming that conifers (prefer dry) were replacing hardwoods in the region. However people carry around a lot of superstitions along with their observations.

The problem I have with the Auden quote is that while it may be true that "Those who will not reason/Perish in the act," they don't perish fast enough and often they don't perish before further polluting the gene pool. And "Those who will not act/Perish for that reason" also don't perish fast enough.